Gradually bringing your toddler's bedtime closer to your own helps with excessive night waking

Here we discuss the evening pressure point on your toddler's body clock. To work with your child's evening pressure point, you gradually make your toddler's bedtime later, little bit by little bit, night after night, over a one or two week period.

(There are two other pressure points you can use to reset your toddler's body clock when she is waking excessively in the night, which are here.)

This might be the opposite of advice you've heard that your toddler needs early bedtimes. Unfortunately, early bedtimes can actually cause excessive night waking over time.

If you're doing a reset, and you've decided you need to work with the evening pressure point, try to make your toddler's bedtime ten or 15 minutes later each night. This can be very hard work (which is one reason why we don't want to be trying to do a reset too regularly)!

You'll need to use your two toddler-sleep superpowers, flexible feeds, depending on the age of your toddler and whether or not you're breastfeeding, and rich sensory motor nourishment, to keep your little one as dialled down as possible as his sleep pressure rises. Often parents find they have to think particularly hard about how to provide rich and changing sensory motor nourishment in a way that is as easy and enjoyable as possible, since parents are typically exhausted by this time of day, and a breastfeed or feed might send the little one to sleep but doesn't help the reset.

Inside the home in the evening, two useful sources of rich sensory nourishment are

• Loud and hilarious physical play with a parent or sibling, often on the floor. You can find out more here.

• Very long and splashy baths with a parent.

If it is at all possible, getting out of the home into an interesting sensory environment in the evenings can make the reset easier, because the interiors of our homes are a low sensory environment for toddlers. Depending on what's sensible in your locality or climate, you might

• Visit the local markets

• Visit relatives or friends

• Walk in the evening air.

A reset involves nudging bedtimes back later and later, over a one or two week period, using rich and changing sensory motor stimulation to keep your toddler dialled down while the sleep pressure rises. Making bedtime that little bit later is not being unkind to your toddler in any way. You'll know when it's time for the Big Sleep (which might be helped along by a feed, depending on how you're doing it and your little person's age).

Our aim is to have the sleep pressure just as high as you possibly can before you decide that now it's definitely time for your toddler to go to sleep.